Circles of Trust:The Creation of International Security Organizations and the Domestic Politics of Multilateralism in the U.S.

Brian Rathbun
Department of International Relations
University of Southern California

April 1, 2009

Tentative book project

“Circles of Trust”

Looks at design of 3 international security orgs:

League of Nations

United Nations

North Atlantic Treaty

Basic Premise

The rationalist approach to institutional design is wrong

Suggests institutional design emerges from the desire to mitigate prevailing mistrust of other parties

States create institutions in order to create incentives for trustworthiness (Koehane; Axelrod) by:

Lengthening time horizons

Putting a premium on reputations

Creating issue linkages

States only cede sovereignty to the extent that your interests converge with the interests of others.

Short of that, states lack trust and seek to retain veto power (Koromenos and Snidal)

The social psychological approach refutes this

Oestlener (sp?) suggests that act in manner that reflects “generalized trust”, i.e. the belief that others are generally honest and trustworthy

Thus, institutions are built on the basis of generalized trust instead of hard information

Social psychologists have found, mostly in lab experiments, that individuals frequently overcome social dilemmas in which short-term incentives contradict long-term interests, through forging this sort of generalized trust

International Security Organizations

A great case for the generalized trust story

States use generalized trust to overcome the social dilemma in favor of institution-building in order to overcome fears of institutional entrapment

Thus, generalized trust in international security settings is an instance of “anarchical social capital”

Types of cooperators

Social psychology experiments point to two types of cooperators:

Generalized trusters

Non-Generalized trusters

Generalized trusters are:

Not naïve. They eventually defect but will wait longer before doing so than non-generalized trusters

Better judges of intentions

Do better in these games

What criteria should be expected to predict trust types in IR?

The left is more trusting than the right in its assumptions of human nature

Issues of civil liberties, for example. Left is more pro-liberties, right is more pro-law-and-order

In foreign policy, the solution to fear or mistrust is increased military spending, and I’ve done survey work to indicate that this is part of a broader ideological division between right and left

Expectations:

The left should be less mistrusting of entrapment in international security

The left should care more about reassurance of other states than the right is

The left should therefore be more multilateralist in terms of dispositional preference

The right should be more inclined to require direct reciprocity instead of diffuse reciprocity

I use party as a proxy for ideology

If we can find differences between political parties over preferences for institutional design, then we have explained something that others have not been able to do

I’m not making a normative judgment. Claiming somebody is trusting or fearful is not inherently a complement or an insult. Both can be naïve. Both can be wise. It depends on context.

Debates among the 3 camps involved divergent perspectives not just on the specific political context but also on the fundamental features of human nature

United Nations Case

Great power veto

Again a hot-button issue

However, justification of the veto as an attempt to constraint the USSR came later

The veto demand actually originated out of this original concern about entrapment by Europe

Same sort of pattern repeats itself in terms of Republican and Democratic preferences about the alliance and beliefs about human nature

Republicans led by Senator Vandenberg at the UN conference itself at Dumbarton Oaks

North Atlantic Treaty Case

Two perspectives

David Lake argues that NATO emerged out of a bipartisan desire for joint gains in security cooperation

I disagree, however

The veto/binding issue again

The Truman Administration saw the purpose of NATO not just to deter the Soviets but also to facilitate European cooperation through a reassurance game via a collective security guarantee for the continent

This is a matter of generalized trust

An alternative was offered by the Republican Senator Robert Taft

Wanted to construct a set of deals for strategic nuclear bases around the world in order to get to the Soviet Union and then a doctrine telling USSR that Europe was off-limits

Required no generalized trust because it was not binding

Feared that a more binding agreement would

Rationalist explanation’s shortcomings

I don’t think Lake can explain these variations in preferences for institutional construction

Lake writes him off as a minority, but it misses that the Vandenberg, internationalist wing of the Republican Party had these same concerns and expressed them all the time.

The difference is that the Democrats brought this moderate Vandenberg wing into the negotiations before the deal was completed in a way that compromised the deal in a number of ways to moderately diminish the requirements for generalized trust

Pre-treaty negotiations within the U.S.

Agreement gutted before the Truman-Dewey election

Agrees only to assist, not undertake, security activity for Europe’s defense

Agreement strengthened after the election

After winning, Democrats don’t need to make as many concessions to Republicans

The deal thus comes to look more European, even though the Europeans didn’t get stronger, the Democrats did

All the non-starters such as the collective security guarantee become much stronger

Agreement scaled back a bit once more in order to secure the minimum winning level of Republican support necessary to secure ratification in the Senate

Had Eisenhower or Dewey been president, I don’t think you would have gotten the North Atlantic Treaty, or at least not in its current form

I think the North Atlantic Treaty is the historically contingent outcome of a particular partisan alignment in the United States at this point in time

Thank you very much. I think this is the first time I’ve presented this book project to a public audience in its complete form.